Birds News

May 15, 2024

Top Headlines

Highly Pathogenic Avian Flu Detected in New York City Wild Birds

May 15, 2024 — A small number of New York City wild birds carry highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza, according to a recent ...

Researchers Uncover What Makes Some Chickens More Water Efficient Than Others

May 14, 2024 — Research indicates a specially bred line of chickens could save growers thousands of gallons of water and thousands of pounds of food each month without sacrificing poultry ...

Island Birds More Adaptable Than Previously Thought

May 13, 2024 — The researchers found that birds were more evolutionarily similar on smaller, more isolated islands than on larger, less remote places. The team had expected to find that forested areas had more numerous and more varied species of birds compared to ...

Birdwatching Can Help Students Improve Mental Health, Reduce Distress

May 3, 2024 — A new study finds people who have nature-based experiences report better well-being and lower psychological distress than those who do not. Birdwatching in particular yielded promising results, with higher gains in subjective well-being and more ...

Latest Headlines

updated 4:26pm EDT

Artificial Intelligence Enhances Monitoring of Threatened Marbled Murrelet

May 2, 2024 — Artificial intelligence analysis of data gathered by acoustic recording devices is a promising new tool for monitoring the marbled murrelet and other secretive, hard-to-study ...

Zebra Finch Chicks Don't Babble for No Reason

Apr. 24, 2024 — Their first vocalizations help young zebra finch males to memorize the songs of ...

How Do Birds Flock? Researchers Do the Math to Reveal Previously Unknown Aerodynamic Phenomenon

Apr. 25, 2024 — How do birds fly in a coordinated and seemingly effortless fashion? Part of the answer lies in precise, and previously unknown, aerodynamic ...

Color Variants in Cuckoos: The Advantages of Rareness

Apr. 24, 2024 — Every cuckoo is an adopted child -- raised by foster parents, into whose nest the cuckoo mother smuggled her egg. The cuckoo mother is aided in this subterfuge by her resemblance to a bird of prey. ...

Study Compares Salmonella Rates in Backyard, Commercial Poultry Farm Samples

Apr. 23, 2024 — Researchers find less Salmonella on backyard poultry farms. But concerns remain about the prevalance of multidrug-resistant bacteria on both large ...

'Itinerant Breeding' in East Coast Shorebird Species

Apr. 19, 2024 — A study has found direct evidence of a species -- the American woodcock, a migratory shorebird from eastern and central North America -- that overlaps periods of migration and reproduction, a rare ...

Mountain Chickadees Have Remarkable Memories. A New Study Explains Why

Apr. 17, 2024 — Mountain chickadees have among the best spatial memory in the animal kingdom. New research identifies the genes at play and offers insight into how a shifting climate may impact the evolution of this ...

Storks Fly With a Little Help from Their Friends

Apr. 17, 2024 — All storks choose to migrate with conspecifics, but young storks rely more on social influences than adults ...

Tropical Forests Can't Recover Naturally Without Fruit-Eating Birds

Apr. 15, 2024 — Natural forest regeneration is hailed as a cost-effective way to restore biodiversity and sequester carbon. However, the fragmentation of tropical forests has restricted the movement of large birds ...

Africa's Iconic Flamingos Threatened by Rising Lake Levels

Apr. 12, 2024 — It is one of the world's most spectacular sights -- huge flocks or 'flamboyances' of flamingos around East Africa's lakes -- as seen in the film Out of Africa or David Attenborough's A Perfect ...

New Computer Vision Tool Wins Prize for Social Impact

Apr. 11, 2024 — A team of computer scientists working on two different problems -- how to quickly detect damaged buildings in crisis zones and how to accurately estimate the size of bird flocks -- recently announced ...

Birdfeeders Are Designed to Keep Unwanted Guests Away

Apr. 9, 2024 — The first birdfeeders were made in the 19th century, and their design rapidly evolved during the 20th century. Researchers at the consider the evolution of the birdfeeder to be an example of ...

Dinosaur Study Challenges Bergmann's Rule

Apr. 5, 2024 — A new study calls into question Bergmann's rule, an 1800s-era scientific principle stating that animals in high-latitude, cooler climates tend to be larger than close relatives living in warmer ...

Four in Five Bird Species Cannot Tolerate Intense Human Pressures

Apr. 5, 2024 — In a recent study, researchers found that 78% of the world's bird species do not thrive in the most modified human-dominated environments. These species are also most likely to have declining ...

More Social Birds Are More Adventurous Feeders

Apr. 3, 2024 — A new study has found that birds that are more social are more likely to use novel sources of ...

We've Had Bird Evolution All Wrong

Apr. 3, 2024 — Genomic anamolies dating back to the time of the dinosaurs misled scientists about the evolutionary history of ...

When Did the Chicken Cross the Road? New Evidence from Central Asia

Apr. 2, 2024 — An international team of scholars present the earliest clear archaeological and biomolecular evidence for the raising of chickens for egg production, based on material from 12 archaeological sites ...

Computational Tools Fuel Reconstruction of New and Improved Bird Family Tree

Apr. 1, 2024 — Using cutting-edge computational methods and supercomputing infrastructure, researchers have built the largest and most detailed bird family tree to date -- an intricate chart delineating 93 million ...

Machine Learning Provides a New Picture of the Great Gray Owl

Apr. 1, 2024 — Researchers upend the notion that the iconic great gray owl -- known as the phantom of the North -- lives far from cities, towns and other markers of human ...

Small Birds Spice Up the Already Diverse Diet of Spotted Hyenas in Namibia

Mar. 28, 2024 — Hyenas are generalist predators (and scavengers) with a broad range of prey species. They are known for hunting (or scavenging) larger mammals such as antelopes and occasionally feed on smaller ...

Lyrebird Synchronizes Elements of Its Mating Dance

Mar. 28, 2024 — To woo a mate, the Albert's Lyrebird of Australia becomes a real song-and-dance bird. Each male first chooses a stage of entangled vines, then in performance he shakes the vines as part of his ...

North American Cities May See a Major Species Turnover by the End of the Century

Mar. 27, 2024 — Climate change may dramatically affect the animal species observed in North American cities, according to a new ...

Wild Bird Gestures 'After You'

Mar. 25, 2024 — A small-bird species, the Japanese tit (Parus minor), uses wing movements as a gesture to convey the message 'after you,' according to new research. When a mating pair arrives at their nest ...

Arctic Nightlife: Seabird Colony Bursts With Sound at Night

Mar. 15, 2024 — Acoustic recordings of a colony of little auks reveal their nocturnal activities and offer valuable monitoring means for avian biology in the ...

Tropical Birds Could Tolerate Warming Better Than Expected, Study Suggests

Mar. 14, 2024 — We expect tropical animals to handle a certain degree of heat, but not wild swings in temperature. That seems to be true for tropical ectotherms, or 'cold-blooded' animals such as ...

High Resolution Imagery Advances the Ability to Monitor Decadal Changes in Emperor Penguin Populations

Mar. 13, 2024 — Emperor penguin populations have been exceedingly difficult to monitor because of their remote locations, and because individuals form breeding colonies on seasonal sea ice fastened to land (known as ...

Who Knew That Coprophagy Was So Vital for Birds' Survival?

Mar. 13, 2024 — New research explains how eating feces (known as coprophagy) shapes wild birds' digestive tracts (gut biota), enabling them to absorb lost or deficient nutrients and adjust to seasonal ...

Alaska Dinosaur Tracks Reveal a Lush, Wet Environment

Mar. 12, 2024 — A large find of dinosaur tracks and fossilized plants and tree stumps in far northwestern Alaska provides new information about the climate and movement of animals near the time when they began ...

The Crow's Best Friend: Humans

Mar. 10, 2024 — A new study has found that when humans are suddenly absent from the urban environment, the activity of the crows and ringneck parakeets that 'live' in the area reduces significantly. ...

Fossil Named 'Attenborough's Strange Bird' Was the First in Its Kind Without Teeth

Mar. 5, 2024 — A new fossil, named 'Attenborough's strange bird' after naturalist and documentarian Sir David Attenborough, is the first of its kind to evolve a toothless beak. It's from a ...